Redford & Nolte Take A Hike That I Liked In A WALK IN THE WOODS

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A WALK IN THE WOODS (Dir. Ken Kwapis, 2015)






Many critics have been dumping on this movie (it’s at 52% on the Rotten Tomatometer), but I found it be a fairly charming, pleasant, and mildly amusing experience. Admittedly, it’s a corny, predictable, and lightweight mash-up of GRUMPY OLD MEN and WILD, but its leads, Robert Redford and Nick Nolte, play off each other well and generate a lot of warmth together.

Redford, who co-produced, plays author Bill Bryson in this adaptation of the acclaimed travel writer’s 1998 book “A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail,” and despite the fact that Bryson was in his mid ‘40s when he made the hike while Redford is nearing 80, it’s a role that I had no trouble going along with.

Growing more and more restless in his retirement, as we can see from an awkward TV talk show appearance and an even more uncomfortable moment at a friend’s funeral, Redford’s Bryson is itching for a new adventure. While taking a walk after the funeral, Bryson stumbles upon a section of the Appalachian Trail near his home in New Hampshire and the idea of tackling the 2,100 mile hike and getting back to nature, starts to take root.

Bryson’s wife (Emma Thompson) thinks the idea is crazy, and prints up a stack of newspaper reports of hikers getting killed by bears with a post-it note attached that says “you’re not going alone!”

Bryson calls every friend he has, but nobody is interested in accompanying him. Then he gets a call from an old estranged friend, Stephen Katz played by the famously grizzled Nolte, who heard about the hike and asks if he can go. Bryson reluctantly agrees with the offer, and the two hit the trail which starts at Springer Mountain in Georgia.

Not far into the trail Bryson and Katz meet Kristen Schaal as a judgy, obnoxious fellow hiker who sings Daft Punk songs at the top of her lungs. The two elders are so annoyed by Schaal that they ditch her and even hitchhike a stretch to get ahead of her.

From there on out, the elderly duo encounter food-stealing bears, life-altering mountain views, a blizzard, the jealous shotgun-toting husband of a woman Nolte takes up with in one of the towns along the way (a SIDEWAYS-ish sideline), and Mary Steenburgen, who always seems to pop up in movies like this, as a friendly hotel owner who flirts with Redford.

Unsurprisingly, Nolte and Redford bicker until they bond, and end up exchanging great truths under the stars while they are trapped on a ledge on the side of a cliff under the path. That sort of stuff.

There’s not much visual artistry to the film; it’s workingmanlike cinematography at best (same goes for Kwapis’ direction) by longtime director of photography, John Bailey, but it frames these gruff old guys good enough, even if it doesn’t awe us as much as it tries (or as much as it awes our leads) with its wide stretches of scenery.

Redford originally developed this project as a vehicle for he and Paul Newman – it would’ve been their third film together after their classics BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID and THE STING - but Newman had the nerve to die before it could be come to fruition (would love to see that version). 

Nolte fits the part of Katz like a glove – he’s boozy without boozing (he says he’s reformed but Redford finds a bottle of whiskey hidden in his backpack), and he goes on the hike to avoid some outstanding warrants back in Des Moines – definitely a character in the actor’s wheelhouse. Plus, Rick Kerb and Bill Holderman’s screenplay adaptation of Bryson’s tome gives Nolte the funniest, saltiest lines like “There are only two men in the world that would sleep with her, and here we are in the same damn town!”

It’s a part that Redford could play in his sleep – the noble accomplished everyman, who uses dry humor as a defense mechanism – but he appears to be having fun here; it’s a welcome fluffy break after his weighty turns in ALL IS LOST and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER and it’s much more preferable to his own directed films of late (the preachy LIONS FOR LAMBS and THE COMPANY YOU KEEP).

A WALK IN THE WOODS is a not bad, but not great buddy road (or mountain?) comedy that boasts a couple of likable legends roughing it (and slumming it) likably. If you manage expectations and go in not expecting Neil Simon you should be fine.

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Jason Reitman's Misguided And Meaningless MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

Opening today at an indie art house near me…

MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

(Dir. Jason Reitman, 2014)

Jason Reitman’s (JUNO, UP IN THE AIR, YOUNG ADULT) latest film, a comedy drama (hate the word “dramedy”) examination of relationships in the age of the internet based on a 2011 novel by Chad Kultgen, is easily his worst film. It’s even worse than LABOR DAY, and I hated LABOR DAY.

Just about every bit of it is misguided and poorly written, a pretentious attempt at cultural commentary that comes off like a guy complaining about everybody being addicted to screens and social media, but has nothing to say about it to say but ‘look at all these people on their devices, it’s awful.’ A rant by Bobby Moynihan’s SNL character Drunk Uncle is more profound than this.

It starts with voice-over narration by Emma Thompson telling us that while the Voyager satellite, which we see via CGI, is venturing through space carrying international music, pictures and greetings to extraterrestrial life, back on Earth, Adam Sandler is having trouble masturbating to internet porn.

Sandler, following the Robin Williams handbook by having grown a beard for this dramatic role, is an unhappily married family man who has to use his son’s computer because his computer is too infected with malware to use. Finding that his son has his own secret sex site fetish, Sandler reminiscences about how he discovered porn in his youth. Yeah, pretty creepy so far.

From there we head to the local high school (the film was shot in Austin, Texas) where we meet Kaitlyn Dever, whose mother (Jennifer Garner) obsessively monitors every instance of activity on her phone and PC, Elena Kampouris an anorexic high-school girl pining to be popular, Olivia Crocicchia, whose mother (Judy Greer) is always taking pictures and videos of in hopes of making her a star, and Ansel Elgort who gave up football for online gaming (in particular, the game “Guild Wars,” which I hadn’t heard of before).

Garner’s character is the film’s heavy, a cold, self righteous control freak who hosts an Internet Safety Parent group meeting in her home and deletes messages on her daughters account before she can see them.

While these threads weave in and out of each other, Sandler and his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt), both inspired by a commercial for AshleyMadison.com that turns their heads away from their laptops in bed, begin affairs at exactly the same time, but luckily at different hotels. While Sandler hires a high price escort (Shane Lynch), DeWitt arranges a date with Dennis Haysbert, credited only as “Secretluvur.”

Meanwhile, Sandler’s son (Travis Tope) is itching to have sex with Crocicchia, who’s his partner on a class project about 9/11 (yep, they went there too), while a relationship blooms between Dever and Elgort, who’s dealing with learning (from a social networking site, of course) that his mother is remarrying. But that’s good news for Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris as Elgort’s father, who begins dating Greer. Reitman regular J.K. Simmons is also on hand as the anorexic girl's kindly father.

There’s a lot of internet meddling by parents – Greer decides that selling soft-core pictures of her daughter online isn’t such a good idea after it gets them rejected by a reality show, Norris cancels his credit card so Elgort can’t play “Guild Wars” anymore, and Garner freaks out when she finds the one site that Dever had secret (Tumblr), ransacks her room, and drives Elgort to suicide by intercepting his messages to Dever and telling him she’ll block him if he texts again.

It’s all so heavy handed and incredibly cringeworthy in its whole ‘internet bad’ statement, and overuse of bubbles for texts (or sexts), and blocks of chat cluttering up the screen. Yeah, I get that its point is that these things are cluttering up our lives, but with its flashy aesthetics and Voyager imagery, something seems off in its thematic ideal that too much technology is threatening our interactions with other people.

And Thompson’s narration so much recalls her writer role in STRANGER THAN FICTION, that I wanted the characters to yell to the heavens for her to shut up.

The film seems to oddly elaborate on a joke in Woody Allen’s 1977 Oscar winning classic ANNIE HALL in which a flashback has the 9-year old version of Allen’s character Alvy Singer explaining to his physician and mother that “The universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.” His mother says that because of this, “He’s even stopped doing his homework,” to which the young Alvy replies “What's the point?”

Blending that cosmic comic comment on insignificance with Carl Sagan’s “Tiny Blue Dot,” which both Elgort and Thompson quote in the film, must’ve seemed like a poetic notion to Reitman, but his awful, drawn out, and uninspired execution here makes for an excruciating experience. Come back, Diablo Cody! Everything is forgiven. (YOUNG ADULT, which I was a bit mixed on initially is looking better and better every day).

In its wanting so desperately to be a movie of the moment, as well as an ensemble rom com, MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN is a dreadful mash-up of AMERICAN BEAUTY and CRAZY STUPID LOVE. It’s for sure, the most meaningless and hard to stomach 119 minutes I’ve spent in a theater this year. 

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